


i have this breath (and i hold it tight)

by leoperidot



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Kyoshi Island, Mutual Pining, Yue (Avatar) Lives, and also other changes, and i hope it's accurate, by that i mean: i haven't read them but i looked on the wiki for the info i needed, vaguely compliant with kyoshi novels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 18:14:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29014935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leoperidot/pseuds/leoperidot
Summary: “We’re using each other’s strength to hold ourselves up,” Suki explains. “Without you, I would fall, and vice versa.”Then, all of a sudden, Suki tugs hard, and the two of them almost crash together.Yue lets out a panicked yelp, but Suki just giggles, tossing an arm around Yue’s shoulders to steady her. “See? I told you I wasn’t gonna drop you.”or, what happens when Yue outlives her destiny.
Relationships: Suki/Yue (Avatar)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 32
Collections: Avatar Rarepair Exchange 2021





	i have this breath (and i hold it tight)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [crashing_meteors](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crashing_meteors/gifts).



> title from "between two lungs" by florence and the machine!
> 
> i did steal a couple of your oc's, candy, i hope you don't mind :) they are so lovely.
> 
> hope you enjoy!!

Yue’s been on Kyoshi Island for almost six weeks when she goes down to the dojo on her own—on Suki’s invitation—in the middle of the day. The sun is high in the sky, and it’s warm out, and when she reaches the low-slung wooden building, the Warriors are just finishing up. 

Yue has passed by here, before, on her daily (medicinal) walks with Yugoda, but she always averts her eyes to not see into the windows. A holdover from Northern habits, maybe, of being kept away from any and all warrior training. A lady, after all, is meant to be defended, not to defend.

Today, she stands outside, leaning on her cane, and watches. 

Together, they move through positions and formations fluidly, like extensions of one being, all green skirts and gold fans and white makeup, seeming even to breathe as one. 

And then they break.

“Nice work, girls,” Suki calls. “Imekanu, Kakula, you two are on duty tonight.”

A shorter girl with wavy brown hair groans in response.

“No buts, Kakula,” says Suki, with a twinkling smile. “We all pull our weight.”

“I showed up to training today,” the girl—Kakula—says. “What more do you want from me?” 

Suki snorts. “All right, get out, all of you.”

“See you tomorrow,” a few of them chorus, as they stream out the front door.

Most of them peer at Yue curiously, and some of them whisper, but by this point, Yue is used to being a curiosity.

“Come inside,” Suki calls to her.

Yue steps gingerly over the threshold. A floorboard creaks under her cane.

Suki must detect Yue’s hesitation, because she furrows her brow. “What’s wrong?”

Yue rolls her eyes. “You know I’m not gonna be able to—” She gestures vaguely out the door, at the retreating backs of the other warriors. “Come on. I’m not strong enough.” 

“You’re thinking about it all wrong,” Suki says with a shake of her head. “It’s not about strength at all. It’s about using another’s force against them—you have to keep your body loose. Here. Put your cane against the wall.” Yue does, and Suki comes closer, holding out her hands. “Grab my arms.”

“What?”

“Just—” She wraps her gloved hands around Yue’s forearms. “And you—”

Yue obliges. The green silk of Suki’s dress is smooth and slick against her hands.

“Keep holding on,” Suki instructs. “I’m not gonna drop you.”

“What?” Yue squawks. 

Suki flashes a dark-lipsticked grin. “Do you trust me?”

Yue gives a reluctant nod.

“Just lean back,” Suki says. “I promise I won’t let you fall.”

So, very tentatively, Yue does. She tightens her hold on Suki’s arms, digs her fingers in until she can feel veins pulsing under sleeves and skin, and starts to tip backwards.

As promised, Suki similarly tightens her grip on Yue, and leans back herself, balancing Yue’s pull on her with her pull on Yue.

“You feel that?” she asks.

Yue nods.

“We’re using each other’s strength to hold ourselves up,” Suki explains. “Without you, I would fall, and vice versa.”

Then, all of a sudden, Suki tugs hard, and the two of them almost crash together. 

Yue lets out a panicked yelp, but Suki just giggles, tossing an arm around Yue’s shoulders to steady her. “See? I told you I wasn’t gonna drop you.”

They’re so close that Suki’s breath tickles Yue’s shoulder.

Yue forces a laugh and pushes Suki away in what she hopes reads as a playful gesture. (Suki giggles, so Yue counts it as a success.)

Suki then launches into a routine of stretches and poses Yue can confidently say she was not ready for. Never more than an arm’s length away, Suki nimbly shifts between demonstrating the moves on her own and gently running her hands over Yue’s limbs, shoulders, torso, guiding each into the correct shape. “Don’t be so tense,” Suki reminds her. “Loose and free. Wiggle your arms around. There you go.”

The lesson comes crashing down randomly, without any warning. Out of nowhere, a wave of dizziness hits Yue—so strong that when she tries to reach out for Suki, she finds herself grasping at empty air. “I—” Her head is spinning, the room is spinning, she’s going to faint—

“I got you.” Two strong hands steady her shoulders. “I got you. Wanna sit down?”

Yue clamps her mouth shut against her nausea and nods stiffly, and then she’s being pushed into a seated position, instructed to breathe, to put her head between her knees and breathe, which she does, and she squeezes her eyes shut and breathes and breathes and thinks she should pray and can’t find the words.

It passes. 

She lifts her head to find Suki kneeling before her, concern written all over her face.

“You okay?”

Yue swallows hard and nods. 

“Good,” Suki says fervently. “I’m sorry if I—if I pushed you too hard, or—”

Yue shakes her head. “No. You didn’t. I promise.” Her head is still a swirling mess, a spiralling whirlpool. “It—happens.” Sometimes, on walks with Yugoda, or when she’s getting out of bed. Ever since—Then. Part of why Yugoda chastises her about the cane so much. 

“I’m sorry.”

Yue clenches her teeth against a frustrated cry. “Stop—” She drags in a breath and lets loose. “Just _stop_ saying you’re fucking sorry, it doesn’t matter. I don’t _care_. You being sorry doesn’t _change_ anything. I’m still—” She cuts herself off with a general gesture at herself—her weak, tired, empty body, her aching bones, her spinning head. The words tear themselves out of her throat, raw and bloody and desperate: “I’m still like _this_!”

Suki inhales sharply.

A pang of guilt stabs Yue just below the heart. Breathing heavily, she swallows hard.

She still isn’t used to anger.

She hardly ever got angry when she was the moon spirit—a docile child, she was called, a kind heart, a pretty face. Maybe it was the impassivity of the moon, its ethereal steadiness, within her, that made her lovely. The moon shone off her.

She isn’t the moon anymore. She’s a mere girl; an earthbound, fickle, human girl, with a bad temper. Easier now to anger her than ever before.

Easier for her to hurt people.

“Sorry,” she says, awkwardly. 

None of this is Suki’s fault. None of it is _anyone’s_ fault, except that Fire Nation maniac with the sideburns. Or her father, maybe. But the Fire Nation maniac with the sideburns is dead, and her father is dead, and Hahn is dead, and half of the people she’s ever known are dead, and the Fire Nation is surely gearing up for another invasion and Yue won’t be there, next time, won’t be there with a piece of the spirit of the moon within her, to be ripped from her soul to save her tribe. 

Yue is still alive, but she isn’t any use, to anyone, any longer.

“I never used to be so angry all the time,” she says, pointlessly. As though that would make it better.

For a moment, Suki just breathes. Just looks at Yue, brow furrowed, and breathes.

“Listen,” she says, finally. “We don’t have to keep training. Let me show you something else.”

“No,” Yue starts, “no, I’m all right, we don’t have to stop—”

“It’s fine. This is just as important. Come on.” Suki offers an elbow to Yue, helps her up, grabs her cane from where it’s leaned against the wall, leads her into a back room off the dojo, which is stocked with the kimonos, the armor, the headdresses. “Sit down,” Suki instructs, and then goes to a cabinet, pulling out a squat table and a set of paints and brushes. She sets them out neatly before Yue.

“The makeup,” Yue says.

Suki smiles.

“You know, when I first got here,” says Yue, idly running her fingers over the cool metallic lid of the paint pot, “I was so delirious, I thought you all were strange creatures with red eyes.” 

Her brain had been fried with fever, her body wracked with infection, when she and Yugoda had washed up on Kyoshi Island’s shores several weeks ago. As she slept in Suki’s family’s spare room for the first time, she dreamed of drowning surrounded by green-bodied, white-faced, red-eyed monsters, circling her threateningly, menacingly—but then they didn’t do anything to her, just carried her to shore. 

“I was trying to tell Yugoda we had to get away,” Yue continues. “But she wouldn’t listen.”

Suki giggles and plops herself down cross-legged across from Yue, removing her thick gloves and placing them on the low table. “I remember you murmuring something, but only Yugoda had any idea what you were saying, and she just gave you medicine and told you to go back to sleep.”

Yue mimics a gagging sound. “Spirits. That medicine. Disgusting.”

Suki swipes one brush into the white paint and gestures for Yue to lean forward. When she does, Suki places one gentle hand on her face, and Yue’s breath stutters.

“This makeup,” Suki says, intently focused on spreading the white evenly across Yue’s skin, “was designed by Avatar Kyoshi herself.” The paint is bracingly cold. Yue can smell Suki’s hands, warm and work-beaten. “Did you know she lived to be two hundred and thirty years old?” 

Yue nods, as small as she can manage. “I had so much history tutoring as a child. Of course I learned that.”

Suki rolls her eyes. “All right, well, not all of us were princesses, Your Majesty.”

Yue resists a smile.

“Kyoshi’s mother was an airbender,” Suki continues, “but you probably already knew that, didn’t you?” The slick cold inches upwards. Yue closes her eyes. “She and her lover founded The Flying Opera company, a daofei in the Earth Kingdom. Eventually, she gave birth to Kyoshi, but she and her lover died very young, and Kyoshi was raised by the daofei.” There’s a soft clinking sound, and Yue opens her eyes to see Suki replacing the lid on the jar of white paint, picking up a new brush, a new jar. “Close your eyes,” she instructs, and Yue obliges.

“This makeup is theirs,” Suki continues. The sensation of the paint on Yue’s eyelids is even colder, stranger, and it’s all Yue can do not to open her eyes in alarm. “The daofei’s. To them, the white symbolized treachery, a willingness to do evil: it was the face they showed to everyone else. It was how they wanted the world to see them. But the red,” she says, drawing the brush up, across Yue’s temple, “was the face they showed to each other. It symbolized their honor, and their loyalty.

“Kyoshi was the first to turn these values outwards. As the Avatar, her duty, her honor, her loyalty was not merely to her friends, but to the world. She served us all.” Suki’s voice is hardly louder than a whisper now, weighted and sincere, like a prayer. She moves onto Yue’s lips now, brushing them with the deep red color, her other hand holding Yue’s chin. “And we, as her Warriors, follow in her footsteps. We are meant to serve the world.”

Yue’s face is suddenly cold when Suki removes her hands from it.

“You look incredible,” Suki breathes.

Yue opens her eyes. The white paint sits heavily on her skin, just barely present at the edges of her vision, and its earthen smell fills her nose. 

“Thank you,” Yue whispers, the moment weighing on her like it’s something holy. Perhaps it is.

Suki fetches a mirror from another shelf and hands it to Yue.

She takes in a gasp before she can help it.

She looks like any Warrior, her makeup sharp-lined and fearsome, her hair dull black and done in the two utilitarian braids she’s taken to since—Then. Her shirt today is even a donated one, from one of the village girls, a deep jade green tone no Northern dyes could have achieved. 

_Be grateful_ , she says to herself, _be appreciative, Suki didn’t need to share this with you and it’s so deeply and beautifully meaningful, the least you could do is not cry about it—_

She’s crying about it.

“Oh,” says Suki. “Oh, are you okay?”

Yue nods, setting down the mirror, mashing the heel of her hand into her eye. “I’m fine,” she says. “Thank you. This is—this—it’s too much, I—I’m so—”

Without warning, Suki snakes her hand into Yue’s open one. “Clearly you’re not fine,” she says, the traces of a laugh in her voice.

Yue hiccups and presses her lips together tight.

“You never told me,” she says, soft and uncannily perceptive, “why you came to Kyoshi.”

Yue’s heart pounds, faster and faster, as though it knows what to do, even if her mind doesn’t. She chews the inside of her cheek, shrugs, and replies, even softer, voice cracking, “It’s a really long story.”

Suki’s hand in Yue’s is grave and protective. “Tell me.”

So Yue does.

The story trips its way out of her mouth all twisty, in fits and starts, a knot more complex than it needs to be. Her mother, distraught; her father’s prayer. “My hair turned white.” She combs the now-black between her fingers. “The moon spirit gave me my life.” _And I was supposed to give it back._

Her mother dying. Her father becoming Chief. Her betrothal to Hahn. The Avatar, and his Southern friends. (Sokka, though she leaves all those details out. She hasn’t managed to look at the mess of emotions that whirlwind _thing_ with Sokka, and the way it ended, left behind in her chest.)

A Fire Nation soldier with the sacred body of a Great Spirit captured in a burlap sack. The world cast in menacing, dangerous red. A ball of fire slashing through the air. The spirit waters, all around her, glowing blue-white, and her own hands on Tui’s lifeless body. 

The moment the moon spirit was leached from her. The red turned to healed blue. And Yue’s world-rending pain.

“I _knew_ I was going to die,” she says. “I was giving back the life Tui had given me, I was ready to die—and then I just . . . didn’t.” 

The disorientation of it all, of breathing and living but feeling torn apart, half-dead.

Hazier now: Flying on the sky bison’s back. In Sokka’s arms. He was holding her hand as tightly as he could muster. She was in and out of consciousness by then, and almost all she could feel was the pain—and then, beside it, the sheer, horrible emptiness. Yugoda’s shriek. Asking where her father was, where Hahn was, where _anyone_ was. Being told nothing except _stay with me_.

Looking up at the moon and, for the first time, feeling nothing. Harrowing, horrifying nothing.

“The next thing I knew,” she says, “I was with Yugoda on a ship somewhere in the Mo Ce Sea. And Yugoda had to . . .” She clears her throat, which doesn’t really help the tightening feeling. “She had to explain to me what happened.”

What happened was, the Fire Nation forces easily overpowered their warriors and all their defenses. What happened was, they cut down anyone in their way. Yue’s family’s servant. Her old geography tutor. Her childhood friends. All of them gone.

Her father was mortally wounded—Yugoda would not tell Yue any of the details. It was a sick curiosity, she knew, but she desperately wanted to know anyway. 

In any case. The last thing he asked, before he died, was that Yugoda protect Yue.

The Avatar and his friends managed to beat back the invaders, then escaped on the sky bison. 

“And Yugoda stole a boat and got me out of there,” Yue says, wiping at more errant tears that have escaped. “And you know the rest.”

There’s silence. For a while.

Then Suki pushes the paints aside and scooches forward to embrace her.

“By the spirits,” she breathes.

Yue doesn’t deserve this, she knows, but she lets herself sink into it anyway, lets herself be comforted, if only for a short while.

“That must have been awful,” Suki insists. “Like you lost a part of yourself.”

“I . . .” Yue sighs. How can she explain it? Losing the moon spirit wasn’t just _like_ losing a part of herself. It _was_ losing a part of herself—it was having a piece of her soul ripped unceremoniously away, leaving her not just damaged, but utterly diminished, no longer herself. No—no, she’s entirely herself, and that’s the problem.

“I’m ruining this makeup,” she says instead. She swipes at her eyes and red and white bleeds onto her fingers.

Suki tsks. “Not important.”

She gives Yue’s hand one last squeeze, then retrieves two washcloths and a basin of water from a cabinet and sets it on the low table between them. 

“We remove each other’s makeup,” she explains, sitting cross-legged in front of Yue and removing her golden headpiece. She tips her face up towards Yue, closes her eyes, expectant.

Very cautiously, Yue wets one washcloth, wrings it till it’s merely damp, and places one hand on Suki’s cheek.

Suki gives the barest of smiles. “Your hands are soft,” she murmurs.

Yue’s heart could give out.

The paint, though thick and heavy, slips easily from Suki’s skin with just a swipe of the washcloth. Yue works slowly, methodically, guardedly, as though Suki’s trusting, eyes-closed face is a privilege she hasn’t earned. Yue catches tiny rivulets of watered-down paint before they can flow into Suki’s hair; she gently tips Suki’s face this way and that, to catch every last bit.

When Yue removes her hand, Suki’s eyes spring open. Without the makeup—Yue has noticed before, but only really understands now—Suki looks not like a warrior, but like a mere girl.

“My turn,” Suki says, bubbly as ever, raising herself up on her knees. “Close your eyes.”

Yue does.

The water is cool, but it’s a pleasanter chill than the paint had been. It washes over her face like a rebirth, removing not just the paint but Yue’s tears as well.

The washcloth passes over Yue’s face one final time, but Suki doesn’t back away. Instead, she sets down the washcloth, cups Yue’s face in both her hands.

Yue doesn’t open her eyes. She hardly dares to breathe.

Suki, her voice that same prayerful whisper as it was when she was speaking of her duty, now says, “You look so beautiful.”

And then she takes Yue’s head, tilts it towards her, and lays a gentle kiss on her hairline.

Yue weeps. And Suki holds her. And they are not warriors, not celestial beings. Just girls.


End file.
